Optimizely Continues Global Growth With New Office in Sydney, Australia

SYDNEY, Aug. 14, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Optimizely, the world's leading Experimentation Platform, today announced its expansion into the Asia Pacific region with the opening of its first Australian base and regional headquarters in Sydney. The new Sydney office, in the heart of the CBD on George Street, is Optimizely's fifth global location outside of the U.S.

Optimizely enables businesses, across sectors, to completely personalise websites, mobile apps and connected devices using statistically-significant data. With Optimizely's technology and platform customers can experiment at scale on all parts of their business including marketing, product, engineering and customer service leading to faster and better decisions.

The new APAC office will be led by Managing Director of Australia and New Zealand, Dan Ross, who previously led the Customer and Sales Operations for Optimizely's Headquarters in San Francisco. Mr. Ross will play a key role in continuing to drive the company's international growth. The company is actively hiring a full go-to-market team - with roles in Sydney and Melbourne - to support its push into the region and to better accommodate the needs of its growing customer base.

Optimizely, which has raised a total of USD $146 million from investors including Index Ventures, Benchmark Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, is seeing continued momentum with leading Australian customers including Atlassian, Optus, AGL Energy, Chemist Warehouse and Fox Sports. The company has experienced 257 percent year-on-year growth in product usage in Australia alone, improving customer experiences for more than 28 million users a month - that's more than the Australian population.

The new regional office and local team will further this momentum and empower more Australian businesses to adopt an experimentation culture to drive innovation and exceptional customers experiences across all their digital channels, both on and offline. Optimizely's first APAC office will allow the company to provide greater support to local customers, while also enhancing its 24/7 global customer support offering.

Dan Ross, Managing Director of Optimizely A/NZ, said the company chose Australia to be its APAC home because of the increasing demand for innovation from business across sectors, strong organic growth in the market and talent density throughout the region.

"We are thrilled to launch Optimizely in the APAC region, a market where we have already been active for several years. This new home brings us much closer to our growing customer base where we already have strong relationships with businesses in the retail, media and travel sectors. We are also seeing considerable uptake by businesses in industries with more traditional business models such as, utilities, superannuation, health insurance and telecommunications. These industries are under threat by increased competition from new and more agile players, which is why they're turning to Optimizely in order to innovate at speed.

"Increasingly, we are experiencing what we call, 'the Amazon effect', which is resulting in a sharp lift in the number of experiments being conducted by local retailers to strengthen their position ahead of Amazon's arrival - a company whose culture is built on endless experimentation," said Mr. Ross.

Optimizely is seeing an increasing number of businesses who are using their products to experiment in multi-channel environments. One such customer is Fox Sports, who turned to Optimizely to help manage the customer experience across 54 digital touch points.

Optimizely's expansion into the region further highlights the success of the last 12 months in which the company has launched its Optimizely X platform, acquired Experiment Engine to enable enterprises to manage experiments at scale and been recognised for its superior products on lists such as Forbes Cloud 100.

Optimizely was founded by Dan Siroker and Pete Koomen in 2010, who conceived the idea for the product while working as Obama's director of analytics on his successful 2008 presidential campaign. Mr. Siroker saw first hand the power of experimentation, when a simple experiment he conducted helped raise $60M in fundraising dollars.

Optimizely is the world's leading experimentation platform, enabling businesses to deliver continuous experimentation and personalization across websites, mobile apps and connected devices. Optimizely enables businesses to experiment deeply into their technology stack and broadly across the entire customer experience. The platform's ease of use and speed of deployment empower organizations to create and run bold experiments that help them make data-driven decisions and grow faster. To date, marketers, developers and product managers have delivered over 700 billion experiences tailored to the needs of their customers. Optimizely's global client base includes Atlassian, eBay, Fox, IBM, The New York Times, LendingClub, Hotwire, Microsoft and many more leading businesses. To learn more, visit optimizely.com.